Josh goes OFF
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Mother Goose and Grimm, 5/21/26
OK, I guess I respect the Mother Goose and Grimm entries where the strip remembers that part of its remit is doing riffs on fairytales, and I guess I count the public domain monsters that Universal Studios has been intermittently trying to turn into a “Dark Universe” franchise for more than a decade as being in the same ballpark as fairytale characters, but nothing about this works. Like having Dracula (I mean that could be any vampire, I guess, but you get it) ask this question makes sense superficially but honestly I feel like it raises more questions than it answers. Is he mad about this or is that just his face? Why are they hanging out together in the first place? And his question is legitimate! And it doesn’t get a good answer! And is that just a regular human lady waitress, like does she work at a lunch counter specifically for monsters or does she just have blood on tap for the regulars? And why isn’t Frankenstein’s monster doing the “Me take cup blood!”-type diction? And why does Dracula say “why” when he clearly should be saying “vhy?”
Crankshaft, 5/21/26
Sorry I got so worked up there, but since I’m already worked up, I might as well break my silence on the fact that Crankshaft has descended into endless interviews with transparent authorial self-insert character “Batton Thomas.” Normally I’d let this indulgence slide without comment but now they’re showing “Batton’s” characters from his “Three O’Clock High” strip like Harry Dinkle, who has already migrated to the current iteration of Crankshaft! We’re in danger of tearing through the walls of the Funkyverse, and I think the time-travelling janitor who arranged for Summer Moore to save humanity needs to pop through a portal here and execute everyone involved Terminator-style before it’s too late.
The Phantom, 5/21/26
Hey, remember Chatu, the infamous Python, the Phantom’s other big antagonist, the one who isn’t Eric Sahara, the infamous Nomad? Well, Chatu has just been kind of chilling in this cage since 2009 or so but, like the Nomad, it seems like he’s about to re-enter the story. Maybe we’ll get a Nomad/Python teamup that will be strong enough to defeat the Phantom once and for all! Or maybe they’ll just realize that the Ghost Who Walks takes up way too much of their mental energy and they’ll simply go do some low-level crimes that won’t attract his attention and leave him be.
Curtis, 5/21/26
A thing that I really love about Curtis is that it’s a strip that’s not afraid to get a little weird with it. The kids gave their teacher a cake for the last day of school, but whoops, the box is full of rats! Lots and lots of rats! What an amusingly odd scenario.
62 replies to “Josh goes OFF”
…as the Monster Diner waitresses damns herself, yet again, for those five years of Women’s Studies in college.
The rats had wanted a big chocolate cake horse to hide in, but it turns out paying the baker with nibbled cheese only gets you SO far.
Curtis – Is this a takeoff of Dave “Kong” Kingman sending a live rat to reporter Susan Fornoff in 1986? Fun fact: Because of this, and numerous other examples of Kingman’s anti-social behavior – the Oakland Athletics didn’t re-sign Kingman. Bad timing for him, since collusion was taking effect in baseball and no other team would sign him. As a result, Kingman set a record for the most home runs by a player in his last season, which stood until David Ortiz broke it a few years ago. But to pay true homage (pronounced homage) to Kingman, Curtis could have made its point with just one rat, not making it into a Slylock Fox “How many rats can you find?” conundrum.
DT “Quick – everyone abandon the city and join the foreign legion, we’ll meet at the fort!”
Phantom I do appreciate that the artist is providing beefcake and not just cheesecake, but don’t the Wambesi know better than to let a prisoner keep a belt?
RMMD If you’ve never seen a “rush” that has two people, max, waiting for a table, I just don’t think the town has the business to support your café, dude.
Luann Here we go… *sigh* I call “wacky” misunderstanding as she goes to the summer camp job
Python remains impressively jacked for a guy whose cage doesn’t even seem to have a place to shit without people watching. No wonder the hot chick with the drums has her eyes closed! They’ve been closed for YEARS.
MG&G: Now, if Dracula ordered wine, *then* I’d really call shenanigans.
While the Diabetics buying sugary products only have themselves to blame, personally as a Diabetic myself, I would still buy Girl Scout cookies, not to eat, but to support them, even if I’m stuck with a bunch of cookies.
Hey! They should take all of the Diabetics in the Funkyverse to Bedside Manor, seeing how they miraculously cured Mort’s dementia and Dinkle’s deafness.
Phantom: Looks like Chatu the Shirtless Python gets weight room privileges in that Wambesi prison. I see the bars on his cell have been upgraded from bamboo to steel.
FC: I dunno, Dolly. I wouldn’t mouth off so smugly to someone wielding a baseball bat.
DT: In case anyone’s curious Zinderneuf was the name of the Foreign Legion outpost in “Beau Geste”. If I was chief of police I would’ve picked Alamo, Thermopylae, or Roarke’s Drift. With Roarke’s Drift the besieged cops could sing a rousing rendition of “Men of Harlech” before BB Eyes, Mumbles, and Double Up made their final assault.
What I love about Phantom is it will happily take a break from a storyline about an alien on a private jet from Guantanamo blowing up a warlord’s brain with magic TikTok to give us a very specific kink scene where a shirtless man in a cage is taunted by a scantily-clad bongo player. I call this fetish “bondage at Lilith Fair”.
@Pozzo: In the Castlevania videogames, before the big epic boss battle with Dracula, he is usually lounging on his throne drinking a glass of red liquid, which he tosses to the floor before fighting.
At one point in one of the games, I believe it was a non-canon spinoff that leaned on the more silly side? The protagonist can pickpocket Dracula, and steals… a glass of tomato juice.
As one online user put “That’s prime blackmail material right there”
CSh: “He was the kind of band director who could sell band candy to a diabetic, in the sense that he had no moral compass or regard for human life!”
Curtis:
Many years ago, back in school, a couple of juvenile delinquents in my class decided to gift our teacher a *very* large brown grasshopper in a box. It jumped out as soon as she opened the box, she screamed, it flew out through the window and disappeared.
The thing is she was a very nice person, too. The nasty teachers never had any such tomfoolery done to them.
Questionable Malcontent:
Yesssssssss cut off that brain eating wriggling alien parasite at the roots.
!
Crankshaft: Isn’t it more likely that “Batton”‘s band director character is actually based on Harry Dinkle? That doesn’t seem all that reality-warping to me.
Wary Morth:
“May take a while….even two or three days!”
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Murky Tail:
Mark: “Local gorilla sanctuary? I’ll open a local yeti sanctuary, bring in Härvêy Camel as director, and get people to donate $200000! Ha haw!”
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Wrecks Moregone:
By tomorrow morning everyone will have had their fill of being waited on by an ex Hollywood starlet and go back to their regular lives and Doug will have to fire Luis and his crew. Luis and his crew, who took this gig instead of a lucrative offer from Wrecks of mowing the grass outside his clinic, will be a mite miffed. Luis will make a few phone calls, and Doug will find himself in an oil drum, with a tyre around his neck, and Hector menacing him with a lighter. Then Mae Mae will have to break in and use her martial arts training to save Doug. Mud will become consumed with jealousy and decide to send Doug to the moon to swing on a set. So much drama! ¡Ay caramba!
@CanuckDownSouth: On Luann – yup, those wacky Masters of Misdirection are at it again!
CS: I see again they forgot to add the ‘ha-ha!’s at Batuik’s sparkling wit. The artist must have finally gotten as sick of this as we are and trying to get himself fired.
JP: Dammit, I was right! Judgey Wudgey has gone to the diner to interrogate the customers about his missing SUV!!
RMMD: ‘We’re time travelers from the 50s, ya got any egg creams or overcooked ham buried in pineapple?’
Phantom: Is DePaul taking Masters of Misdirection lessons from the Evansii? I guess Schmelon Schmusk just flew off with the Nomad to Schmepstein Island or something and we’ll see them again in a few months (if ever) because once again the Syndicate came to them after reading some recent headlines and told DePaul ‘we *really* don’t need this kind of trouble right now! One more strike and you’re out!’
@The Rambling Otter: FYI if you do meet some GS cookie sellers – there’s always a “donation to troop” option (even in the digital cookie app that allows credit card and venmo these days), so you can support them and not have cookies around if you don’t want to, plus many troops also have an option to buy boxes they’ll donate to military or old folks homes.
@pugfuggly:
Bat
iukTON THOMAS has forgotten that the joke behind Harry Dinkle is supposed to be “There are two kinds of people who wear military uniforms covered with medals they awarded themselves while having never served; fascist dictators and marching band directors. Which one is Harry Dinkle? The answer to ‘Is Harry Dinkle a music teacher or a fascist dictator?’ is YES.”….
Or maybe he’s just playing to his audience of music teachers, who didn’t get the joke, and craved for Dinkle to transform into this larger-than-life hero?
CURTIS: Oh, Mr Junior Street Smarts totally failed to notice that he was carrying a box of writhing, sugar-hyped rats?
MW: Could we at least alternate between the Tommy POV and the Brandy POV? I like some variety in my mind-numbing tedium.
GT: I’m glad to see Gil show a little “neener-neener.” He takes way too much crap from people.
H&L: Ditto seems to be hypersensitive to certain sounds. I hope Dot’s next instrument is the bagpipe.
Phantom: I see they’ve given Chatu an enriched environment, with a tree to climb and some rocks. I wouldn’t be surprised if at feeding time they put his meals inside a puzzle-box. Jungle prisons have really improved since the days when they were just cement-floored cells.
Why is that lady drumming outside Chatu’s cage? Did his lawyers get him the right to live music?
@Scratchy Scrotum LXIX: Not to deny that the rat and collusion combined to put Kingman out of a job, but they weren’t necessary. His 35 home runs were his only contribution, and not enough to salvage his performance as a designated hitter who batted .210 and produced his customary awful defense when he did take the field. He thus put up 0.8 wins below replacement according to Fangraphs’ measure, which is to say that the A’s would’ve been better with a random guy from the minors.* By this measure it was the worst season with at least 30 homers until 1999 Dante Bichette, who got downgraded because any geek off the street could hit 30 homers in Coors Field in 1999 and also his defensive ratings were really bad. Still the worst with at least 35.
In short, homers aside Kingman just didn’t have the kind of performance that could survive being a jerk that nobody liked.
*Or a washed-up Reggie Jackson, which is who they got to DH next year; he was bad in his final season but not as bad as Kingman. The next year they repeated it with Don Baylor. Finally in ’88 they landed on Dave Parker, who was well past his prime but at least had a bit of juice left and didn’t have to retire for a couple more years.
@Ukranazi Stepan: Maybe it’s some sort of magical ward, where she has to keep playing to keep the cage sealed.
“Play forever non-stop random woman, you don’t want him to escape do you?”
MW: So Brandy just went to Florida indefinitely, I guess? And her job and her landlord were both fine with that?
MG&G: Interesting fact: Did you know that Transylvania was actually a part of Hungary at the time Stoker wrote Dracula? And so, despite having a Romanian name and a Romanian noble title (boyar), it’s possible that the single most famous fictional Romanian was actually intended to be Hungarian? I don’t know where I’m going with this but then, the strip clearly didn’t know where it was going with its joke, so fair is fair.
@The Rambling Otter:
The Music of Erica Zahn, Bangalla Edition.
@CanuckDownSouth: Thank you so much!
I don’t know why I never thought of that, but that makes so much sense in hindsight.
Wrecks Moregone:
“A whole seven customers! Imagine! At this rate we might even serve more customers today than the number of people working here now!”
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I was going to suggest that Doug invite Mud to provide live music to attract customers, but then I realised that all that would do is turn people off their food. Possibly forever.
@Ukranazi Stepan: Eating in the same room with a guy nicknamed “Mud Mountain” would definitely kill my appetite.
I imagine everyone in Batiuk’s life has stopped listening to his stories.
Hager: Ahhhhh the cure to depression is to think of all those people that you slaughtered way back when. Good memories. Good memories.
Now back to my current rap sheet.
MG&G: At first, when I saw Dracula and the Frankenstein monster just hanging out together at a diner, I thought, “This seems rather low-stakes.” And then I thought about doing some kind of pun on the word “stakes” because of Dracula. And then I realized how short life is and how much of it I’ve already wasted.
‘shaft: Forgive my cynicism, but these “exaggerations” are unforgivably lame. I’m sure some diabetics do buy band candy. And I really don’t care how the Cleveland Orchestra raises money. Give me something exciting, like: “At the height of his power, he was banging a different supermodel every night.”
Phantom: I think, if you were to ask a really stupid and racist person what daily life in Africa is like, this is what they’d come up with.
Curtis: You know how, at the beginning of the first Star Wars there’s a robot who looks very similar to C-3PO walking right behind the actual C-3PO and it’s kind of disorienting because who the hell is that other robot? Well, I think there’s something similar happening here. As Real Curtis recoils in horror from the rat attack, there’s an Almost Curtis weeping in the corner. Who are you, Quasi Curtis? Do you have hopes and dreams beyond not being bitten by rats?
BG&SS: I suppose that hyphen will save the strip from a lawsuit from Trey Parker and Matt Stone.
Phantom: What’s impressive about Chatu’s physique isn’t that he’s had the self-discipline to maintain it—I mean, what else are are you going to do when you’ve been extrajudicially imprisoned in an open-air, 8-foot by 8-foot cage, wearing the same pair of jeans for 17 years, except body-weight and isometric exercises—rather, what’s impressive is that the Wambesi have apparently been feeding him, what 3500, 3600 calories a day with at least 250 grams of protein?
Pluggers: Or maybe Plugger cat should look into some new glasses, perhaps with progressive lenses, or at least with lenses that don’t appear to vacuum lock directly over the eyeballs themselves? Seems uncomfortable.
I really should, at some point read “And then there were none”
I do enjoy a good Murder Mystery setup.
When I was a kid, there was a computer game called “The Colonel’s Bequest”
It started off with a typical “Elderly man invites entire family to his estate for the reading of his will, that his fortune will be divided between all family members after he dies” then everyone gradually starts dropping like flies. In which the protagonist (who was invited by her best friend and has no relation to the family) starts finding the bodies indicating that someone is killing them off one-by-one.
Although the thing is it had a VERY interesting twist (which is very easy to miss entirely and just assume the red herring answer that the game directly throws at you)
Past me would have just outright said the spoiler on here despite lack of spoiler tags, assuming that no-one would really care.
But you know, I think I know better now.
@Lauralot: On MW – Heck, if Wilbur can do it…
S4th: I just figured it out. This is Mrs. Ted Forth jangling her keys to get the Forths into the car like the pack of insipid golden retrievers they are. They *think* they’re going on a fun road trip, but instead it’s a one-way trip to Happy Acres or perhaps just the middle of nowhere. Not all of Ronan’s skills are whimsical and sexy…
I can’t wait until the self-aggrandizing hack starts telling us how fucking brilliant his cancer story was through a smug author insert again.
MG&Grimm: Do diners sell steaks? Just wondering….
@The Rambling Otter: Yes. Are they good? No.
@Joe Blevins: @The Rambling Otter:
Oh my…
Curtis: One-eyed pocket rats! This is clearly sexual harassment of an educator, and far too early for a school year to be ending!
And might as well keep with a theme:
The Phantom: [Glancing at Chatu’s jeans] “More like ‘Garter Snake,’ amirite?”
Curtis: “Wait, this cake is supposed to be for P.S. 38!”
Pluggers: Ugh. How hard is it to remember: “Slit film, place in microwave on high for 4 minutes, remove film–careful, it’s hot!” What today’s entry omits is this Plugger makes this same TV dinner every day. Incipient dementia is funny!
@MKay: Could we at least alternate between the Tommy POV and the Brandy POV?
No. As @Schroduck explained yesterday, that is not the Mary Worth Way.
Also The Phantom: If you’d been the victim of a continuous drum circle since 2009, you’d look ready to gnaw your way through a steel cage too.
@Joe Blevins:
On Crankshaft , and alternative Dinkle exaggerations : How about “He’s advised the Cleveland Orchestra on fundraising for DECADES… maybe one day, his advice will actuallly be SOLLICITED… though they’d have to rescind the restraining order first, I guess…”
No? Still lame?
@The Rambling Otter: If you like the idea of murder mysteries with really different twists, I’d also suggest the Agatha Christie “Towards Zero” – I read it decades ago in a Christie phase and much like And Then There Were None, the plot twist was really memorable
Mother Goose and Grimm: Man, if there was ever a time we needed bats :[ to come back and explain what the hell was going on, it would be now.
Phantom: It turns out that Chatu has just been at the Wambesi spinoff of Burning Man for the last while.
MG and G:
“Is this guy part of your family, Drac?”
“Yes. He’s a blood relative!”
Phantom:
“Are you drumming up support for me, lady?’
The Phantom: The Wambesiland prison system is too chaotic for my tastes. Keeping its prisoners half-dressed in some sort of open-air zoo is obviously criminal, but the sexy bongo concerts slap! Serious mixed messaging here, though. Do I want to go to prison in your fictional nation or not? Make up your mind, Wambesiland!
@46 I’m Not Cthulhu, But I Play Him On TV: What’s to explain? The diner doesn’t have a washed up actress for a waitress. The diner ran out of one of the two non-caffeinated beverage they carry, herbal tea. Frankie had the only other choice, blood. Any questions? It’s not funny but the logic is there.
C’shaft: “That’s not funny!”
“My department budget was slashed again this year!”
“Don’t you think we’d rather be doing anything else than urging our students to sell crappy chocolate bars in order to make ends meet?”
Curtis: I don’t know the events that lead to this, and I don’t want to know. I’m just content letting it be a Heathcliff-esque foray into the surreal.
Phantom: I admit, I’m not very well versed in the traditional costumes of West African tribes. However, Bongo Gal here is making me think less “ceremonial musician” and more “person playing for tips on the Nassau cruise ship pier.”
And Mother Goose and Grimm, again:! “I used to ramble for pages about the unfairness of being thrust into the world, alone, by a mad creator indifferent to my suffering, Drac. Now I can barely manage five or six words of a lame joke at a time. What happened to me?” “You got tenure and stopped caring?”
‘Shaft: Implying that the Cleveland Orchestra engages in ethically dubious behavior while fundraising is something to expand upon. I imagine them coming into quiet neighborhoods at 1am and playing until a bass drum is sufficiently filled with cash.
@Baja Gaijin: I didn’t ask for logic! I asked for bats :[ to explain.
MG and G:
“How would you colloquially describe that prodigious honker of yours, Count Vlad?”
” ‘Nose fer, ah, two’ !”
RMMD/JP – So Hector called in his posse to help out with the washed up actress rush at the Glenwood Motel cafe, and left Nick’s diner in Cavelton short staffed at just the moment when the washed up Judge showed up.
Phantom:
“Let me out of here! I want to be able to use ChatuGPT!”
MG&G: Dracula’s totally chill, just has resting vampire face.
I can forgive an aging cartoonist who knows he’s nearing the end of a long career a little nostalgia and inserting himself into his last remaining strip to tell his story. What I can’t forgive is the addition of a character listening to the story and not looking bored at the self-fellating.
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Look, Python, you’ve got fresh air and a beautiful woman playing the drums. As far as extrajudicial imprisonment goes, you’ve kinda got it made.
***
That’s a small open box that supposedly had a cake in a room full of children. It is an insult to everyone’s intelligence to pretend that not one of them looked in the box with the rats that sat there silent and still before the whole thing was presented to the teacher. I will be writing a sternly worded letter to the editor, believe me.
MG&G: Frankenstein reacts when Vlad crashes the flirtatious wordplay he and the waitress engage in.
“I’ll have a cup of blood, [wink wink] (i.e. ‘bloody Mary’).”
Vlad: Blood?
“Yeah, coffee keeps me awake (asshole)”
CS: I am really racking my brain trying to parse that “adviser to the Cleveland orchestra” comment. Is that supposed to be a joke? Is there something inherently funny about that position with the Cleveland orchestra? It makes plenty of sense to me that someone passionate about music and good at fundraising would help the local orchestra. If it’s not a joke, what purpose is it serving in the narrative? He’s describing how over the top this character is, and that seems wildly pedestrian to me.